


Someplace Quiet

by AlulaSpeaks



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 14:13:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14854295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlulaSpeaks/pseuds/AlulaSpeaks
Summary: Death said Sam was fated to kill Rowena, so she shouldn't be surprised to see him. The only problem is he should have died decades ago.





	Someplace Quiet

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to WetSammyWinchester for the speedy beta that really helped pull this thing together.

The bellboy opens the door to the suite, rich mahogany glowing in the warm, orange light. He looks ridiculous in his red jacket and the little red hat that has come back into fashion in these “retro” hotels. Despite the ridiculous nods to a bygone age, Rowena still prefers the old style luxury hotels. Give her red carpet and golden mirrors, and alcoves with overstuffed leather chairs that no one ever sits on over metal, and chrome, and wall-high windows with the projectors built in to change the New York skyline into Paris. If Rowena wants to go to Paris, she will go to Paris, but she hasn’t felt the need for a long time.

“Was there anything else?” the bellboy asks as he fidgets with his sleeve. His eyes skitter over her and away, something suspicious in the tilt of his mouth. It won’t do to have him go downstairs asking questions. There was a time when Rowena would have pinned him to the ceiling for less, back when the joy of her power was in being strong enough to be so carelessly cruel without fear of consequences. Now she prefers to focus on the finesse of subtle magic, getting what she wants with the fine application of practiced skill. It would be a simple matter to slip the boy’s worry from his mind. It’s the smart move, but somehow it doesn’t feel worth the effort.

“Run along, dear, I’m sure you have work to do,” Rowena says, raising a pointed eyebrow.

The boy swallows and spins on his heel. She doesn’t bother to watch him go, slipping off her coat and draping it over the settee. The soft thump of someone catching the door makes her freeze in her tracks.

“You’re a hard woman to find,” a deep and familiar voice says.

A chill runs down Rowena’s spine and she turns to find Sam Winchester standing in her doorway, impossible but for the fact that he’s Sam Winchester and impossible gave up on him a long time ago. The light catches on the gray at his temples and the sheen of sweat on his throat. He looks exactly like he did the last time she saw him decades ago, except for the new tears in his shirt, the soot on his fingers, and the notable addition of the pearl-handled gun in his hand.

“Why Samuel, you haven’t aged a day,” Rowena says, sidles around the table, closer to her purse with the hex bags in it. “What’s your secret? Do you moisturize?”

“Don’t,” Sam snaps. Rowena freezes and looks up to find the gun pointed at her heart. Sam may not have aged, but there is something different about his face, something unnerving.

“Are you here to kill me?” she asks, unable to keep the quaver from her voice. She’s never forgotten what’s written in her book of fate, though she believed Sam gone years ago.

“No, I’m not going to hurt you.” Sam opens his hands so the gun hangs from his thumb by the trigger guard.

“And what about your brother, would he say the same?” Rowena asks and sits down at the table.

“Dean’s gone, has been for a long time” Sam says, voice flat. The look on his face doesn’t change and Rowena understands what is different in Sam. His once expressive face has lost its animation, every expression muted and constrained as if he is made of stone. The thought makes her jaw clench. How many times has Rowena looked at her own unchanged face in the mirror, untouched by centuries of time, and wondered if she weren’t made of something other than flesh?

“I need your help.” Sam sets his gun on the sideboard and kicks the door closed behind him, coming to her empty handed. He sits across the table and looks her in the eye. “Something happened to me. I can’t die and I want you to help me figure out why.”

Well, that is unexpected. Rowena eyes Sam up and down, puts the holes ripped through his clothes in a new perspective. There is raw skin beneath but no blood, and he hasn’t aged. A new puzzle is a pleasant surprise.

“Give me your hand.” She should extract a promise from him that he will leave once she helps him, but she doesn’t. When they parted ways last time, soon after Michael was dealt with, she made sure they were even, all favors called in. Everything neatly squared away, with no intention of ever seeing him again. So much for that. She holds out her hand and Sam lays his palm against hers. “When did it happen?”

“I don’t really know. After Dean… well, the world still needed saving. I tried to keep it together for Mom and Jack, but after awhile I just stopped being careful, you know?” Sam fingers one of the slashes in his shirt and Rowena pushes away thoughts of the bellboy that she should have hexed. “At first I thought I was really lucky, surviving wounds that should've killed me, but it didn’t take long to figure out that I wasn’t so much surviving as not dying.”

Rowena calls up her power and presses in against Sam’s skin. She knows as soon as it touches him, but she keeps him talking as she feels out the different threads of energy that tangle up in Sam. “How did you find me?”

“There was a hunt across the street. Saw you arrive. It was dumb luck.”

Rowena hums, she wouldn’t call that luck. She follows that thread of emotion all the way until it meets a road block of energy that shouldn’t be there, and now there can be no doubt.

“You can’t die, because you aren’t human anymore.”

Sam’s mouth presses into a grim but unsurprised line. “Then what am I?”

“I don’t know,” she says as she sets Sam’s hand back on the table. “Something new.”

“Can you fix it?”

“You stumbled into immortality and you want me to… fix it?” Rowena can’t help but laugh. She spent years and years of dedicated study to solidify her power and cheat death at every turn.

“There was a girl tonight. I wasn’t being careful and she almost died and for a second, I didn’t really care.” Sam’s eyes are shadowed, and Rowena catches a glimpse of something ancient behind them. “I’m tired, Rowena, and I don’t know how much of me is left to give. All I’m asking is that you help me become human again. I’m not saying I’ll die tonight or tomorrow or anytime soon, but there has to be a way to stop me if I go off the rails. There need to be consequences for me, too.”

“Sam–” Rowena starts, thinking to say something about mistakes and change, give back what they told her long ago, but he cuts her off.

“You know where monsters go when they die?” Sam asks and Rowena nods. “Dean was still human when he died.”

“But you don’t know where he went or if you’ll go to the same place,” Rowena snaps.

“I can tell you he isn’t in Purgatory” Sam says, “and a one in three shot is better than no shot. Wherever I end up, if Dean is there too, he’ll find me.”

The naivete of that makes Rowena want to scream. Hell is hell and the empty is empty, what chance do they really have? But then she remembers about impossible and the Winchesters, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so strange.

“It doesn’t really matter why, does it? The question is, will you do it?”

She thinks long and hard about the chances for blow-back. Sam may not want to kill her, but messing with something this unknown could backfire. Still, there is no way to know for sure, and it makes sense, doesn’t it, to turn an immortal threat into a mortal one. That’s all this has to be.

“You’re sure?” she asks, and Sam nods, smiles at her for the first time.

Rowena takes his hand again, threads her power in along his veins to the twisted threads of energy knotted in Sam’s core. She closes her eyes and sinks into her task. It’s delicate work, pulling at them enough to untangle them, snapping the ones that don’t belong but leaving the essential ones. There’s one thread of power that’s so enmeshed in Sam that she dares not pluck it out, she works around it until the last strand of foreign energy is severed and the job is done.

“Oh,” Sam gasps and his hand goes clammy in hers then pulls away. When she opens her eyes, Sam’s bent over in his chair, hand on his stomach, forehead creased.

“Sam?”

“It worked,” Sam says voice wet as he leans back in his chair. The seam of his lips is painted red, he lifts away his bloody palm, and Rowena can see the gaping gashes in his stomach through the holes in his shirt. He sighs, face slipping into something like relief.

“You knew.” Rowena says, gut clenching. He’s dying right in front of her and he knew and now there is nothing she can do. Her power holds together and pulls apart but it doesn’t heal.

“I wondered,” Sam says and flashes her a strained half-smile.

“Does it hurt?” Rowena asks, though she knows it must. She wants him to tell her it doesn’t, that pain is something you can transcend, even if she’s never managed it.

“Yeah.” Sam coughs, covering his mouth and his hand comes away covered in thick black blood.

“Oh Sam, couldn’t you have lied to me one more time?”

Sam laughs, red splattering the corner of his mouth, “No, it-it’s good that it hurts again.”

Something must show on her face - disbelief or worry, she doesn’t know, hardly knows what she’s feeling - because Sam’s eyes soften.

“It’s okay, it can’t last forever. Nothing ever does,” Sam says and it sounds well-rehearsed, like something he’s told himself a thousand times, and for a flash of an instant Rowena hates him for still being kind, for forcing her to witness this, for making her want to reach out and hold his hand so he won’t be alone. It doesn’t last long; she can’t hate him, even if that would be easier.

“You’re a terrible guest, getting blood all over my carpet.” She says, because she can’t stand the silence or the way Sam’s legs squirm under the chair, in too much pain to sit still.

“Not yours,” Sam grunts, flicker of a smile subsumed by a wracking cough. He doesn't manage to cover his mouth this time. His hands white-knuckle the armrests and his mouth works silently, struggling to speak. “Thanks,” he says, half-swallowed and strangely clipped. His leg kicks out, and he groans long and low in his throat.

“Hush, now,” Rowena says, her own voice strangled, but Sam has already fallen quiet. His hands slip from the armrest to land upturned in his lap. He doesn’t move again.

A half hour ago, Rowena thought Sam Winchester was long gone and that she escaped her fate. Now she knows that she has. Nothing has really changed but somehow the world feels emptier. She sits there for a while, staring at the carpet and waiting for a Winchester miracle, but it doesn’t come, so she slips on her coat and grabs her bags. Halfway to the door she stops, thinking of the bellboy and his stupid red hat again, of him finding Sam slumped in the chair and not knowing who he is, the enormity what he’s done, the good and the bad of it. The strange hands that will touch his body and lay him out on a cold slab and cut into him as if he were any other John Doe. She can’t stomach the thought of it. She turns back.

A wave of her hand and the blood disappears from his mouth and between his fingers, the puddle on the carpet. Sam’s chin is slumped to his chest, hair falling across his eyes. She reaches out without thinking, hesitating for a moment when she catches herself, but not enough to stop. She brushes back his hair and knows with a sharp and aching clarity that it was a mistake. The look on his face defies her understanding, not a smile, not exactly, but something gentle and welcoming, the beautiful lines of his face made soft again. The image crawls inside her and she’ll never unsee it, knows it will linger for as long as she lives.

“Is this how you do it?” she whispers, tucking one last strand behind his ear. She slips a hex bag on his open palm, wrapping his fingers around it. She steps back, whispers a spell under her breath and Sam’s body bursts into flames. When it’s done, she opens the balcony door, calls up a breeze, and watches it carry Sam’s ashes away.

She looks out over the lights of the city, breathing deep of the cool night air. There is life and power in her yet, but now there is something else, too; a kernel of an idea. When Paris and New York can no longer hold her, if her heart grows too cold again, there is someplace she can go, someplace quiet. For the first time in a long time, death doesn’t feel like an enemy to outsmart and Rowena doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with that.


End file.
